It is this cavity that makes the electron bubble so very valuable. In a quantum computer, the quantum entities need to be isolated from their surroundings to preserve their fragile states. "What could be more isolated than an electron in a bubble?" asks Weijun Yao of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island the originator. "The electron inside each bubble interacts very weakly with the background helium atoms."

Yao says 0s or 1s could be encoded in the electrons' spins. In the presence of a magnetic field, the spin can either be parallel or anti-parallel to the field. Crucially, an electron's spin can exist in both states at the same time, enabling the qubit to be both 0 and 1.

According to Yao, large numbers of electrons, each in its own bubble, can be neatly caged using a combination of a device called a linear quadrupole trap, which traps the electrons in a line, and a set of conducting rings, which create a voltage "valley" for each bubble (see Diagram).

All the spins can be initialised to the same value by cooling the apparatus to 0.1 kelvin. You can then manipulate the electrons by applying a combination of a magnetic field gradient along the line and varying the frequency of the voltages in the quadrupole trap. This changes the spin of individual electrons and makes them interact to perform logicgate operations (www.arxiv.org/ cond-mat/0510757). To read the spin of an electron, the voltage at the end of the electron chain can be lowered so that each bubble drifts in the magnetic field gradient at a velocity that depends on the electron's spin. This drift velocity can be read using lasers.

Because each qubit carries two values, a quantum computer with two qubits could carry out four parallel calculations, one with three qubits eight calculations, and so on. "I see no major technical obstacles to the system I envisage working with 100 qubits," says Yao. "That means it could do 1000 billion billion billion operations all at once."